How to NOT Execute Your Strategy (Episode 29): Damon Lembi
Ilias Simpson serves as the President of Cart.com, where he leads the company’s operations, technology, strategy and growth teams. In addition, Ilias is a veteran of the United States Air Force. With nearly two decades of leadership experience in logistics and supply chain management, Ilias is fanatical about the execution of strategy. In this episode, Ilias shares the lessons he learned when his strategy failed because he didn’t account for the strategic dependencies that REALLY mattered.
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Three key concepts:
- Your strategy will fail if the dependencies are not accounted for. This is one of the biggest leadership mistakes that I personally see most often. Strategies demand more than budget. We need to proactively secure the people, time, energy, and resources that will be required for the strategy to work.
- Expect your team to create answers. There is no way that you can know everything. More importantly, if you did – your team would eventually disintegrate. Strong leaders know how to facilitate getting great answers, and – ultimately – great decision-making from the entire group.
- Maximize the situation – not the player. It’s really easy to give your star players the metaphorical ball. But if you really want to lift your overall performance, define success as a team outcome – not just what the start players produce. Push people out of their comfort zones to see how it impacts the greater team’s production and discover what might have been overlooked.
BONUS – Leader guide: Use the following questions for (a) self-reflection as a leader and/or (b) a great discussion with your team.
1) Listen to the full episode before this discussion.
2) Ilias and Tim talked about the need to understand your dependencies before launching a strategy. Have you ever experienced a time when a strategy launched and the dependencies were not in place? What happened?
3) In 10 words or less, define what dependency means. Share your answers.
4) Dependencies come in all kinds of categories. How many categories can you list? Share your answers
5) Having dependencies ready in advance is absolutely critical to execution. What happens to empowerment when the dependencies are not ready – or do not even exist?
6) Looking at our efforts now, have we generated the right of empowerment? Why or why not? What leadership advice does this generate?
7) Option: Take time right now to define exactly what following that advice looks like (the outcome(s), metrics, and requirements).
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with at least one person. And leave me a review on whatever platform you engaged this podcast. Your feedback is invaluable to me.
Holomua. Onward and upward.
All the best ~ Tim
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